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Megan Morgan is an award-winning paranormal and contemporary romance author from Cleveland, Ohio. A mild-mannered airport bar supervisor by day and purveyor of things that go bump in the night, she lives on the often-wintry shores of Lake Erie with her spoiled cat and adult son, both of whom shed too much.

I Is For Inconsistencies

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

INCONSISTENCIES

So, you wrote a book. Congratulations, dummy. Oh, you wrote a series of books, and got them published? Do you know how much time that took away from staring at walls and contemplating your fleeting existence? You could have been brooding over how much you hate life, but instead you went and did something productive that made you happy.

Well, you’re not going to be happy for long. Go back and take a look at your series. Here’s what you’re going to find:

– That side character named Stacy in the first book is now Joyce in the third book. Maybe she hated her name because it reminded her of her dead grandma, so she got it legally changed. Yeah, let’s go with that.
– You wrote a series about vampires who can battle the sun, but in book 8 one of them steps outside at noon and is burnt to a crisp. Maybe he was weak. Maybe he had a skin condition or something.
– Despite the fact that three beta readers, two editors, and yourself read this twenty times, your hero’s dog in the first book became a cat later. Just pretend you were writing a shifter story all along.

Inconsistencies happen, and they’re one of the worst things about writing. They happen in the best-planned books, they happen to famous, successful authors. They get in there and they’re not caught until they are, usually by a reader. It’s okay I suppose, because it’s exactly like life. When I was twenty I could run a mile without getting winded, now I’m out of breath just looking at a set of stairs. Whoever is writing me is keeping crappy notes.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

I know I have already commented once, but I saw something on a T.V. show the other night I wanted to run by you. Do you watch an ABC show called Designated Surivior? To be brief two F.B.I. agents head out to North Dakota in mid-February chasing a lead. When they drive across the prarie their is greenery everywhere. I see that as Inconsistent. There is snow there until April.

I don’t watch it, but this makes me think of Shameless, which is set in Chicago. I live in Cleveland and we have the exact same climate. At one point they were trying to pretend it was December, but you could see by the trees it was actually early spring. I’ve caught a few instances on there where I could tell they were filming in the wrong season, because I’m from the region.

I don’t know why, but the word “dummy” will make me belly laugh every time. :0) I’ve found that using the characters bios in Scrivener has helped me have less inconsistencies over the years, and thank goodness, because they drive me crazy!

My all-time favourite TV show is rife with inconsistencies. The writers once answered this by claiming each series took place in a slightly different universe. You could totally go with that theory for series in a book, and voila! Problem solved.

Oh my God, that sounds like either a bunch of lazy writers or too many writers who didn’t know what each other was doing. It happened in one of my favorite shows recently too. Mind if I ask which show?

In consistencies in movies, television shows or books galre at me like a Super Nova and get me really steamed. Care enough about your work to read, re-read and read again. I think the bigger a project is the more likely there is to be gaps, because the writer knows what he writes, Or at least he or she thinks so.

Same here! I’ve seen them even in the most popular of TV shows! One that I was watching very recently comes to mind, and it seems like in a later episode they realized their whoops and tried to clean it up with a lame excuse. It happens!

LOL I don’t know if you watch Shameless, but it was in that. Frank claimed he didn’t know who Sammy’s mother was, but then a few seasons later Sammy’s mother showed up and they were good friends who instantly recognized each other. They tried to explain it away with he was drunk that night.

I think Dallas was on when I was very young. I’m 41, I just went and checked, it stared in 1978, when I would have been a toddler. But I’m surprised to see it ran through 1991! It looks like that plot took place in 1979-80 though, so again, I was just in kindergarten!

I have an eye for catching inconsistencies while reading. The one I find pretty irksome is the ‘change the tense from present to past with no heads-up’. The third example you mentioned is too hilarious 😀

True, eh? I caught one such inconsistency in one of my favourite series by one of my favourite authors once. And I did wonder at the time, how could he ever gotten this wrong?
But as you said, it happens.

And so enters me… a content editor. Who spends his time finding fault in cartoons for kids and notices the tiny details that you’re like, “Why can’t you ever just enjoy something?” I’m too smart for my own good… lucky for you.